You probably couldn't find a more powerful boss in a first job than the president of the United States.

Amy Erixon, president of Global Investment Management at Avison Young, counts President Jimmy Carter among the many she's worked with in a career that spans six decades. In 2012, she founded Avison Young's investment management practice, which is active in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Germany and U.K. and invests in all property types on behalf of major institutional investors.

If Erixon, who works at the brokerage's Toronto headquarters, had her way, she would have gotten into commercial real estate when she was 5 years old. That's when she figured she wanted to be in the development business.

"I grew up in a town that was shrinking, Spokane, Washington," Erixon said. "Down the street from my kindergarten, they had torn something down and started building a shopping mall. On my recess, I wandered down to the site, and the [construction] superintendent was curious about this little girl looking through the fence, and he invited me into the trailer [office] and said I could look at the plans."

It didn't take school officials long to figure out a child was missing.

"And pretty soon, my father shows up ... asking what in the world I was doing," Erixon said, adding he might have set her on a path for truancy when he said, 'You probably learned more than you would have at school.'"

In high school, she dated the son of one of the area's top developers. That afforded her the chance to look at a project's master plan in his father's office on the weekend.

She earned her degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology near Boston. While at MIT, she convinced academic officials to allow her to create a program in urban planning, but she faced some pushback from her male counterparts.

"Even when I was [taking the courses], I would get why are you 'taking this program sweetheart? No one is going to hire you to oversee their development.'"

At the end of her second year of college, she was accepted into an internship program at the White House working on national urban policy. She met President Carter several times during the six-month period in 1976.

Erixon remembers working on issues ranging from lower speed limits in residential areas to putting solar panels on the White House to public housing as part of her internship.

"We changed public housing in the United States," said Erixon, who was part of a group that instituted different financial structures, like vouchers for tenants, low-interest loans, construction incentives and tax deductions. "Before, it was built by the government and run by the government. It was instant slums."

Wanting to break into the commercial property industry after graduation, Erixon took a job in the lending division of Prudential Insurance.

"The head of the office was also from Washington state, and he did not tell the corporate office he had hired a woman. He just said he hired the tallest applicant," Erixon said with a laugh.

Lending was not her passion, but when interest rates went to 20%, the company had "12 million square feet of busted projects," and someone with real estate knowledge like Erixon became more valuable.

"Everyone went broke. Overnight you are a developer. They sent me to Chicago because of my background, and [suddenly] I'm in the development business finishing projects," said Erixon. "I always knew what I wanted to do, but the question was how do I get in as a woman."

One of her most notable early projects with Prudential's development partner Beacon Capital was Post Office Square in Boston, where an original federal reserve bank was converted into a hotel. In Chicago, she was the project manager for a Hyatt expansion on Wacker Drive.

"What I learned from these experiences was I had entrepreneurial experience, and you can get through anything," said Erixon. "The difficulty factor of those projects was part of the joy."

Her advice to anyone starting in the industry is to learn as much about as many things as they can in their early years.

"Go as broad as you can and learn multiple functions because the market crashes every 10 years without fail, and you need to be able to move around," said Erixon. "Crashes are an opportunity. You learn way more. If you solve someone's problems, they will stick to you like glue because they are so grateful."

Everyone in commercial real estate had to start somewhere. CoStar's First Job column explores where careers began.